New Big & Rich Album Is ‘Inevitable,’ Says John Rich

It’s been more than four years since Big & Rich released their last album, and the years since have seen both Big Kenny and John Rich start successful solo careers — but from all the fun they’ve been having on this year’s reunion tour, it’s obvious they missed making music together.

Seeing Big & Rich back on stage raises the natural question of whether or not they’ll return to the studio for another album, and fans who have been keeping their fingers crossed for new recordings from the hitmaking duo can rest easy because John Rich says he’s sure it’ll happen.

“Kenny and I are swapping songs, swapping ideas, so I would say it’s inevitable, it’s coming,” Rich told Billboard during a recent interview. “And it’s not like people can pitch you songs for a Big & Rich record; our music is not like anybody else’s stuff. It really is a meeting of the minds between me and Kenny, so it’s just a process. But we’re pumped about it, I can tell you that.”

According to Rich, the duo’s hiatus was always temporary. “It was a break from Big & Rich, not an ending of Big & Rich,” he insisted during the interview. “I think a lot of people spun it into, ‘Oh no, Big & Rich is over.’ We didn’t say that. There wasn’t, like, a Brooks & Dunn farewell tour. There never was a concern about whether we would want to come back and do it; our concern was whether the fans would still be there. And sure enough they are.”

They already have a head start on the comeback trail, thanks to the inclusion of a new Big & Rich song ‘Fake I.D.’ on the ‘Footloose’ soundtrack. “We had recorded this song but hadn’t decided to put it out yet,” Rich explained. “The ‘Footloose’ people heard it and said, ‘We want this song in the movie. We want to play the whole song in the movie,’ and it really is used that way, in this really cool bar scene. So we said, ‘What the hell. Let’s put it out,’ and now we kick off our shows with ‘Fake I.D.’”